Just another company...
...to hold the SuSE brand.
What will happen to OpenSuSE?
Let's stay all calm now...
Legacy software lover Attachmate has put one of its own long-time executives in charge of what was formerly Novell's SUSE Linux operation and will focus that unit on serving Linux customers and growing Linux business. Attachmate has tapped Nils Brauckman, formerly vice president of sales and marketing for the company's EMEA …
"Hopefully this will be the end of Novell as we know it, and Ubuntu/Canonical will replace them as the #2 commercial Linux brand."
That IMHO is just about the last thing that the Linux market needs.
It is what Shuttleworth wants. That is the only way he will get any viable ROCI but please consider what being a Commercial Brand means.
For one it means stability. Don't talk about their LTS releases. They are still unstable compared to SLES/RHEL.
For another it means not pissing your customers off. Changing things so rapidly is a big NO NO in business. Look at the longevity of a single RHEL release. For all of the V5 releases they used the same 2.6.18 kernel base. Things didn't change. Customers could move from say 5.1 to 5.4 knowing that 99% of things wouldn't break.
Canonical has a lot to grasp let alone learn about being a commercial success.
I'd actually recommend Debian over Ubuntu if a customer really wanted that type of distro.
It is far more stable than anything that Cannonical has ever released in the past 3 years.
Dunno why, I don't seem to get on with Debian-based distros.
And I don't particularly like Red Hat - they're the biggest boy on the block so I avoid them on principle (I like to support the smaller guys :-) Plus when I tried them in the v5 days, SuSE just seemed so much - easier ... - to use - it just felt more comfortable.
Lose SuSE, and where would I go? I use gentoo for me, but I support various other sites so it has to be something I'm comfortable with.
Losing SuSE would reduce the diversity - it's one of the oldest surviving distros, being a slack derivative. The majority of distros out there are now either Debian or Red Hat derivatives and I'd hate to see an unrelated old-timer disappear :-(
Cheers,
Wol